And no coin collections, no cash, no traveler’s checks, no bearer bonds, no stock certificates, no rings, no watches, no cut or uncut precious stones (although there was a rather nice chunk of petrified wood with felt glued to the bottom so it could be used as a paperweight), no gold bars, no silver ingots, no stamps more precious than the three-cent jobs in the booklet, and, by all the saints in heaven, no blue box, leather or otherwise.

Hell.

This didn’t make me happy, but neither did it make me throw up. What it made me do was straighten up and sigh a little, and it made me wonder idly where old Flaxford kept the Scotch until I reminded myself that I never drink on a job, and it made me think about the cigarettes in the silver dish until I recalled that I’d given up the nasty things years ago. So I sighed again and got ready to give the drawers another look-see, because it’s very easy to miss something when you’re dealing with a desk that is such a reservoir of clutter, even something as substantial as a cigar box, and I looked at my watch and noted that it was twenty-three minutes of ten, and decided that I would really prefer to be on my way by ten, or ten-thirty at the very latest. Once more through the desk, then, to be followed if necessary by a circuit of other logical hiding places in the living room, and then if need be a tour of the apartment’s other rooms, however many there might be of them, and then adieu, adieu. And so I blew on my hands to cool them as they were beginning to sweat a bit, not that blowing on them did much good, encased in rubber gloves as they were, and this may well have led me to sigh a third time, and then I heard a key in the lock and froze.

The apartment’s tenant, J. Francis Flaxford, was supposed to be off the premises until midnight at the very least.

By the same token, the blue box was supposed to be in the desk.